Views Towards Health Promotion Interventions within Dental Settings: A Pilot

Practitioners across the dental team have been successful with interventions that improve oral health, including diet, tobacco use and oral hygiene. More general "lifestyle" risks, such as alcohol misuse, that have both implications for oral and general health, are often ignored. Yet dental patients are typically characterised as proactively seeking to improve or maintain their health, suggesting opportunities to improve general and oral health are being missed.

Objectives: To explore members of the dental team's attitudes towards both oral and general health interventions. To assess barriers and feasibility of delivering more general health interventions across the dental team. To learn from successes in oral health and assess whether these successes can be applied to more general health contexts.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews with three dental students, three nursing students, three hygiene/therapy students and four members of staff employed to teach the students from Cardiff Dental School. interviews were recorded, transcribed and thematic analysis used to extract themes relating to interventions across the dental team.

Results: Practitioners perceive that a lack necessary skills and available resources are barriers to health promotion delivery, barriers that are compounded by the current dental contract, regulatory bodies, and dental education.

Conclusions: While patients are receptive to advice that improves both dental and general health, barriers to health promotion advice exist across the entire socio-ecology of dentistry. This indicates that a multi-level approach is needed to understand health promotion and develop feasible interventions.